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“This is Dr. Anne Wirthlass, the project manager of the Austen Rover. She will answer any questions you have—I hope perhaps you will answer some of ours?”
I made a noncommittal noise, and Wirthlass gave me a hand to shake. She was tall, willowy and walked with a rolling gait. Like everyone in the lab, she wore a white coat with her Goliath ID badge affixed to it, and although I could not see her precise laddernumber, she was certainly within four figures—the top 1 percent. Seriously important.
“I’m pleased to meet you at last,” she said in a Swedish accent. “We have much to learn from your experience.”
“If you know anything about me,” I responded, “you’ll know exactly why it is that I don’t trust Goliath.”
“Ah!” she said, somewhat taken aback. “I thought we’d left those days behind us.”
“I’ll need convincing,” I returned without malice. It wasn’t her fault, after all. I indicated the tour bus. “How does it work?”
She looked at John Henry, who nodded his permission.
“The Austen Rover is a standard Leyland Tiger PS2/3 under a Burlingham body,” she began, touching the shiny coachwork fondly, “but with a few…modifications. Come aboard.”
She stepped up into the bus, and I followed her. The interior had been stripped and replaced with the very latest technology, which she attempted to explain in the sort of technical language where it is possible to understand only one word in eight, if you’re lucky. I came off the bus ten minutes later having absorbed not much more than the fact that it had twelve seats, carried a small thirty-megawatt fusion device in the rear and couldn’t be tested—its first trip would be either an utter failure or a complete success, nothing in between.
“And the probes?”
“Yes, indeed,” replied Wirthlass. “We’ve been using a form of gravity-wave inducer to catapult a small probe into fiction on a one-minute free-return trajectory—think of it as a very large yo-yo. We aimed them at the Dune series, because it was a large and very wordy target that was probably somewhere near the heart of Science Fiction, and after seven hundred and ninety-six subfictional flights we hit pay dirt: The probe returned with a twenty-eight-second audiovisual recording of Paul Atreides riding a sandworm.”
“When was this?” I asked.
“In 1996. We fared better after that and by a system of trial and error have managed to figure out that individual books seem to be clumped together in groups. We’ve started plotting a map—I’ll show you if you like.”
We walked into a room next door that seemed to be filled to capacity with computers and their operators.
“How many probe missions have you sent?”
“About seventy thousand,” said John Henry, who had followed us. “Most come back without recording anything, and over eight thousand never return at all. In total we have had four hundred and twenty successful missions. As you can see, getting into fiction for us is at present a somewhat haphazard affair. The Austen Rover is ready for its first trip—but by simple extrapolation of the probe figures, every journey has a one-in-eight chance of not returning, and only a one-in-one-hundred-and-sixty possibility of hitting something.”
I could see what they were up against—and why. They were hurling probes into a BookWorld that was 80 percent Nothing. The thing was, I could pretty much draw from memory a genre map of the BookWorld. With my help they might actually make it.
“This is the BookWorld as we think it exists,” explained John Henry, laying out a large sheet of paper on a desk. It was patchy in the extreme and full of errors. It was a bit like throwing Ping-Pong balls into a dark furniture store and then trying to list the contents by the noises they made.
“This will take you a long time to figure out,” I murmured.
“Time that we don’t really have, Ms. Next. Despite my position as president, even I have to concede that the amount spent will never be recouped. All funding for this project will be withdrawn in a week.”
It was the first time I’d felt any sort of relief since I arrived. The idea of Goliath’s even setting so much as a toe inside fiction filled me with utter dread. But one question still niggled at me.
“Why?”
“I’m sorry?” said John Henry.
“Why are you trying to get into fiction at all?”
“Book tourism,” he replied simply. “The Austen Rover was designed to take twelve people around the high points of Jane Austen’s work. At five hundred pounds for a twenty-minute hop around the most-loved works, we thought at the time it would be quite profitable. Mind you, that was nine years ago, when people were still reading books.”
“We thought it might reinvigorate the classics,” added Wirthlass.
“And your interest in the classics?”
It was John Henry who answered. “We feel that publishing in general and books in particular are well worth hanging on to.”
“You’ll excuse me if I’m not convinced by your supposed altruism.”
“No altruism, Ms. Next. The fall in revenue of our publishing arm has been dramatic, and since we own little in the way of computer games or consoles, the low ReadRate is something that affects us financially. I think you’ll find that we’re together on this one. What we want is what you want. Even though our past associations have not been happy and I understand your distrust, Goliath in its reborn shape is not quite the all-devouring corporation that you think it is.”
